| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| tooth |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  t th |
| NOUN: | Inflected forms: pl. teeth ( t th)
1a. One of a set of hard, bonelike structures rooted in sockets in the jaws of vertebrates, typically composed of a core of soft pulp surrounded by a layer of hard dentin that is coated with cementum or enamel at the crown and used for biting or chewing food or as a means of attack or defense. b. A similar structure in invertebrates, such as one of the pointed denticles or ridges on the exoskeleton of an arthropod or the shell of a mollusk. 2. A projecting part resembling a tooth in shape or function, as on a comb, gear, or saw. 3. A small, notched projection along a margin, especially of a leaf. Also called dent2. 4. A rough surface, as of paper or metal. 5a. Something that injures or destroys with force. Often used in the plural: the teeth of the blizzard. b. teeth Effective means of enforcement; muscle: “This . . . puts real teeth into something where there has been only lip service” (Ellen Convisser). 6. Taste or appetite: She always had a sweet tooth. | | VERB: | Inflected forms: toothed, tooth·ing, tooths
(tth, tth) | | TRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. To furnish (a tool, for example) with teeth. 2. To make a jagged edge on. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | To become interlocked; mesh. | | IDIOMS: | get (or sink) (one's) teeth into Slang To be actively involved in; get a firm grasp of. show (or bare) (one's) teeth To express a readiness to fight; threaten defiantly. to the teeth Lacking nothing; completely: armed to the teeth; dressed to the teeth. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Old English t th. See dent- in Appendix I. | | WORD HISTORY: | Eating, biting, teeth, and dentists are related not only logically but etymologically; that is, the roots of the words eat, tooth, and dentist have a common origin. The Proto-Indo-European root *ed–, meaning “to eat” and the source of our word eat, originally meant “to bite.” A participial form of *ed– in this sense was *dent–, “biting,” which came to mean “tooth.” Our word tooth comes from *dont–, a form of *dent–, with sound changes that resulted in the Germanic word *tanthuz. This word became Old English tth and Modern English tooth. Meanwhile the Proto-Indo-European form *dent– itself became in Latin dns (stem dent–), “tooth,” from which is derived our word dentist. We find a descendant of another Proto-Indo-European form *(o)dont– in the word orthodontist.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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